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Optimize Your Workforce with Recession-Proof Strategies, Part Two

Business Leadership Contingent Workforce General Insights HR Talent Technology and Innovation by John Yuva on 08/10/2023

We’re now two months into the second half of 2023 and economically speaking, things are looking positive. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that GDP grew 2.4% in the second quarter of 2023. The labor market remains tight with unemployment at 3.6%, a rate not witnessed in decades. However, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the tight labor market allows the Federal Reserve to continue raising interest rates to fight inflation. Currently, inflation rests at 3%, a percentage point higher than the Federal Reserve’s longer-run goal of 2%.

Does the state of the current U.S. economy equate to a “soft landing” and the evasion of a recession? Maybe, maybe not. Due to the expectation of continued interest rate increases and the potential ramifications, uncertainty remains among executives and their enterprises. Thus, many are considering strategies over the next six to 12 months to recession-proof their critical workforce and their organizations.

With that in mind, the Future of Work Exchange features part two of a three-part series exploring several contingent and overall workforce strategies to achieve a recession-proof enterprise over the next few weeks. Part two explores the next three strategies.

Enhance Overall Workplace Culture

Enhancing a workplace culture for both contingent and permanent workers means creating opportunities for communication, engagement, and performance. First, it should start with clearly communicating the enterprise’s core values and mission that lead to consistent behaviors and performance goals. The mission and core values should permeate the enterprise and be modeled by leadership. Second, a workplace inclusive of different backgrounds and perspectives, while also promoting employee engagement, fosters a sense of belonging and community. Inclusiveness and engagement can transform workforce communication as well as generate collaboration and strategic problem-solving. And third, institute a reward and recognition system that promotes higher performance, skills development, and innovative thinking. Ultimately, bringing enhancements to the workplace culture not only helps retain talent but attracts it as well.

Holistic Approach to the Workforce Beyond Productivity

The Future of Work has brought greater attention to the workforce beyond just productivity. HR leaders, business managers, and executives who take a holistic workforce approach are placing greater emphasis on employee empowerment, emotional intelligence, and meaningful work. When employees are given more autonomy, they take ownership of their work and experiment with new ideas — a win-win for the employee and the enterprise. Similarly, leading with empathy has been shown to create a more supportive environment where managers and employees are more attuned to the well-being of colleagues. When it comes to purpose, assigning employees to projects where their passions or strengths lie makes the work more meaningful. That alignment will enhance job satisfaction as well.

Reallocate Budgets for Investment in Automation and Technology

When it comes to realigning budgets for greater investment in automation and technology, begin with identifying redundant processes and inefficient workflows. Show stakeholders how automation can eliminate the costs associated with inefficiencies. From a talent perspective, employing automation for talent acquisition and talent management, particularly for the contingent workforce, can bring those processes in-house for more strategic decision-making. Extended workforce platforms expand the power of VMS technology, for example, by offering more talent-oriented solutions that augment how a business manages nuanced, Future of Work-led aspects, such as DE&I, talent communities, services procurement, the candidate experience, the hiring manager experience, etc. With enterprises shifting to skills-based hiring, utilizing automation and technology to attract candidates with specific skills and competencies is now a strategic imperative.

The economy is proving resilient against a recession. However, implementing holistic workforce strategies focused on talent attraction and retention, workplace culture, and automation and technology can be just as impactful against recessionary trends. Next week, we’ll explore three more recession-proof enterprise workforce strategies.

Is Waning Productivity a Worker Problem…or a Leadership Problem?

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 11/02/2022

What do tech CEOs such as Google’s Sundar Pichail, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsft’s Satya Nadella all have in common? These three, amongst many other high-profile executive leaders, are calling into question whether their workers are working hard enough. Nadella has even coined a term, “productivity paranoia,” that translates into heightened corporate anxiety over whether or not their teams are producing as much as they should.

In a feature published in The Washington Post yesterday (and posted by Boston.com), news of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ work on tracking productivity has businesses rightfully worried about their teams:

Employers across the country are worried that workers are getting less done – and there’s evidence they’re right to be spooked. In the first half of 2022, productivity – the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour – plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What’s incredibly interesting about this turn of events is that, just last year, these productivity figures sparked to their highest level in decades. The Post, in the August 2021 article, attributed these gains to better working conditions, enhanced access to remote and hybrid work models, and other factors. So…what changed?

A return to “normalcy,” even if it can be considered that (more like “semi-normalcy”?), is most likely a culprit after two-plus years of living in pandemic-led conditions. After all of the discussions in 2020 and 2021 (and into this year) regarding the permanent shifts in how we work, it is shocking to see figures like the ones the BLS revealed this week.

The one thing that we are missing here, apparently, is just how permanent the shifts in how we lead truly are. Were the transformations towards empathy, compassion, emotional wellbeing, and better working conditions just a mirage? Or were they for real?

Conscious leadership isn’t just a mindset; it’s a state of being that cascades into how our workforce is treated, how we value them, how we support them, and how we show appreciation. There’s an incredible gap today between the way business leaders are leading and the way they should lead, and that’s reflected in how we are more likely to hear about enterprises failing to provide sick leave, proper maternity or paternity leave, or dynamic support for emotional and physical wellbeing.

Leadership is often broken. And so are some of the ways we work.

Employee engagement is a real and powerful attribute of the modern-day enterprise. The concept at its core is so very, very simple: ensure your workers are engaged, and, in return, they will dedicated to the organization, which, of course…results in increased productivity. Unfortunately, however, we are not fully living in that world today. Worker burnout is all-too common in nearly every company. Emotional wellbeing is not being prioritized at the scale that it should be. Extended vacation and sick leave benefits only exist in a small percentage of organizations.

If a business puts more stock in a free company lunch than it does its overall workplace culture, it’s a serious problem. The issues with productivity, as found by the BLS, can be attributed to a seismic failure at the leadership level of businesses across the country. Does this mean that 100% of the blame falls at the feet of executive leaders? Well, no. Those employees and workers that have engaged in “quiet quitting” are certainly guilty of waning productivity due to taking their collective foot off the gas and producing the bare minimum.

However, there’s a reason for the vast majority of quiet quitting instances that does, indeed, link back to failures at the leadership level. Are leaders being unreasonable with productivity requests? Are there putting more and more pressure on already-stressed workers? Although not many organizations are the same size (or bigger) as Twitter is, the recent takeover by Elon Musk has reportedly resulted in the controversial billionaire asking engineers to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week to meet deadlines. Musk already created a firestorm during the process leading up to his ownership of the social media platform, and seems intent on bringing that attitude into its day-to-day operations.

Over the past two years, we’ve seen (and heard) high-profile CEOs and executives eschew remote work as “aberrations” and being wholly unsustainable. There’s been a major tug-of-war between workers and leaders over return-to-office plans. And, to top it all off, some leaders even believe that flexibility isn’t a foundation of their workplace culture.

There are certainly many workers out there that aren’t pulling their weight. However, there are many, many more workers that are burnt out, disengaged, and disconnected from their workplace’s culture and vision. This is a signal that the problem of waning productivity starts at the top, with business leadership needing even more transformation than it ever has before. Lost in all of this dialogue is the fact that workers are humans, and humans experience feelings, emotions, and desires that can be affected by toxic attributes of their roles.

While economists have no clear answers on why productivity may be tumbling, looking at the rollercoaster transformation of business leadership may be the first clue. It doesn’t matter if an employee works from home, works in a hybrid model, or is in the office full-time; having leaders that lead with empathy and consciousness is the linchpin to sparking real engagement…and avoiding dips in productivity.

The Hybrid Work Model is So Much More Than “Working From Home”

Business Leadership Diversity and Inclusion Talent by Christopher J. Dwyer on 07/26/2021

Look around at the typical news sources. Some of them are proclaiming doom for the vaunted “hybrid work model” in which businesses allow their workforce to work remotely several days a week while limiting in-office time. These same news sources and pundits were, not too long ago, singing the praises of the digital enterprise and its ability to adapt during unprecedented times. There’s no doubt that many business leaders crave a return to pre-pandemic times, when their devoted workers would trudge through awful commutes, sit through endless meetings, and deal with all of the Dilbert-like annoyances of life inside of an office.

However, it’s mid-2021…and workers have moved on both physically AND emotionally. Simply put: the hybrid work model is here to stay.

Some businesses might see the dramatic drop in coronavirus cases (even though the Delta variant is causing upticks and surges across the country) and a splurge of available vaccines as a ticket back to normalcy. “Normal,” as in “Let’s go to the pub down the street” or “Let’s catch a screening of “Space Jam,” sure, alright. “Normal,” as in “Let’s go to the office five days a week”? Nope.

Workers have had a near-18-month period in which they have not only been enabled with the ability to work from home (or anywhere with an internet connection), but also the very spirit of flexibility in how they approach their roles, projects, and overall workload. Businesses adapted to changing times, shifting how they measured productivity and the overall impact of their workforce. That flexibility has cascaded into how workers and business professionals structure their days, interact with their family, coordinate child care and related activities, and ultimately how they choose to apply their time across various projects and initiatives. Employee well-being has also rocketed up the priority list, with nearly 68% of businesses expected to integrate employee well-being into remote and hybrid workforce structures, according to upcoming Future of Work Exchange research. One of the many silver linings of the “greatest remote work experiment in history” was that so many business professionals now had the ability to incorporate exercise and well-being directly into their workday, choosing a mid-afternoon jog instead of a pre-commute run, or a late morning Peloton ride in-between video meetings.

Let’s forget, for a moment, that the hybrid work model is often centered around physical proximity and instead focus on mental energy. The hybrid work model is more than just telecommuting; it revolves around the notion that business leaders care about their workers and want them to be productive and happy. There is a symbiotic link between the talent experience and the hybrid work model that cannot be ignored ever again. With diversity and inclusion at its most important inflection period (and rightfully so, as a core component of the Future of Work movement), creating an “inclusive” culture and workplace translates into ensuring that employees are happy, healthy, and feeling welcomed by their peers and leaders. With so much of the Future of Work revolving around productivity and business outcomes, enterprise leaders must ensure that they are designing flexible work environments that allow an “elastic” means of getting work done, which includes a level of empathy and well-being in how they manage their total workforce.

While the media may be feeling pressure to report on the “Next Normal,” they are forgetting that the changes over the past year weren’t temporary, but rather fundamental shifts in how businesses operate moving forward. Nearly 90% of businesses, according to FOWX research, expect a sharp increase in remote work over the next 18 months. Furthermore, the expected percentage of workers operating in remote or hybrid environments is expected to double by the time 2021 ends, from 21% pre-pandemic to nearly 40% at the end of the year. The technologies and tools now available to even the smallest of businesses means that flexibility, collaboration, and productivity can all converge to result in positive business outcomes.

The hybrid model is more than working from home. It means being more available to family. It’s about being more engaged with one’s emotions and personal needs. It is the improvement in work-life balance and making work more meaningful. It means being both more productive and having an enhanced quality of life. It is, in essence, the Future of Work.